Campanelli: Sentinel (31 page)

              “
That
, is a military-grade implant jamming device, Campanelli,” Maximilian explained in a highly amused tone. “You see, Vanek told me all about your visual situation.”

              Frank pointed his pistol to where he thought the voice was coming from and fired. The round struck a wall in the distance. Unprotected, Campanelli’s long-pampered ears exploded in pain, whistling from the eleven millimeter’s blast. The next sounds he heard seemed to come from within a cardboard box stuffed with packing foam.

              “Woah there, Tex!” Maximilian mocked and laughed some more. The voice sounded as if the man had moved behind something, but Frank could not be sure. “Be careful where you point that thing. You might actually hit somebody!” the preacher laughed heartily.

              Frank stood his ground, feeling completely helpless but determined to take this man down. “Your fancy church is going up in smoke, DeSilva!” he spat. “Surrender now and let’s get out of here!”

              “I don’t think so,” Maximilian said, suddenly without humor. “If my plans are ruined, so are yours.”

              The ringing in Frank’s ears subsided enough that he was able to hear the click of DeSilva’s handgun safety latch. Remembering the cubby hole to his right, he dove there, hoping not to slam into the wall. Maximilian pulled the trigger with his target in flight, not knowing whether he had hit the man or not.

              Frank landed on the boxes, their corners jamming into his ribcage on his way to the floor, where he landed face first. He crawled forward and, feeling about, quickly located the walls which encompassed him. Turning over, he sat up against the wall and pointed his pistol at what he hoped was DeSilva’s only way in.

              Then he remembered something. He thrust his left hand into the pocket of his sport coat.

              “There’s nowhere to go, Frank,” Maximilian informed him victoriously. “Think of it! You could have accepted my bribe and fucked off. Or, you could be on the way to O’Hare airport, like the Vanek family should be right about now.”

              Frank quickly extended the
RadarCane
and activated it. Pointing it away from him and swinging it left, the high tones began to sound and gently increase in frequency until the tip touched the boxes along the wall, giving him that deep ‘
wowowow
’ collision warning. Bringing the cane to the other direction, the medium tones emitted to warn of the wall on his right. ‘
Wowowow
’ reported contact with the wall.

              Campanelli waved the point of the cane out in front of him, lifting the tip higher into the air as he listened hard for the tones.

              “You could have played along and given me my way, Frank,” the preached went on tediously.

              The deep tone sounded briefly then stopped. Campanelli angled it back to the right.

              “But you had to be a boring public servant.”

             
Wow-wow, wowow
.

              “Oh, and what is
that
, Frank?”

             
Wowowowow
!

              Campanelli raised his handgun parallel with the cane and pulled the trigger several times. In the tiny space, his ears protested painfully until he could hear nothing but their ringing.

              Assuming he had put his target down, he lowered the barrel to where he imagined DeSilva was lying, writhing in pain but still active. He fired twice more. He tried a third, but the trigger would not move. The gun was empty.

              He took several breaths only to discover that it was very difficult. The air tasted foul on his tongue and burned his lungs on the way in. Frank coughed violently as he waited for Maximilian to return fire or taunt him further.

              Nearly a minute went by before his pained ears could hear the roaring fire beyond their whistling. The reports of his coughing again sounded as if they came from within, rather from someone on the other side of the room.

              Somewhere, a part of the church collapsed, shaking the floor beneath him. Campanelli cussed between coughs, thinking about the last time he had been inside a burning building. It had cost him almost everything; his wife, his son and his eyes.

              This time, he figured, it would cost him everything he had left.

***

              “Well, somebody has to go in there!” Tam all but screamed to be heard over the approaching sirens.

              Several fire engines had already arrived, but as the large structure had gone up so quickly, more of them were sent to the scene. It seemed to the very frightened Tamara Billingsley that the domed building had been made to burn. As the flames burst through the windows, the white exterior paint browned with the heat before turning black. Once the surface blackened, it drew the flames like an incendiary chemical. She could overhear firefighters murmur about the speed at which the building was going up and she grew more and more scared for Frank.

              Terry the chauffeur, afraid for his own arrest, resisted the urge to flee. He pondered the reasons for his actions as he stood with Tam, unwilling to trust that she would not run back inside. Once the flames took to the framing of the giant garage door and that of the little door next to it, the choice had gone.

              “Oh, my God!” she suddenly exclaimed and placed her hands over her face. She had been sending texts and audible messages to Frank since her escape and, though he had not taken the time to answer them, his
CAPS-Link
implant had shown on her own implant’s communications status as active. The “
Frank
” label suddenly went missing as an option without first displaying a weakening signal bar that denoted movement out of range. “
Frank
” was there one second and then simply disappeared from the list.

              Terry asked her what was wrong and she explained. Just then, Deputy Chief Alonso arrived in his own cruiser, recognized her and ran to meet her at the entrance to the widened alley that served as the facility’s driveway.

              “Tamara?” he called as he came, for he had met her at a policeman’s ball some months before. She turned and he noticed the frantic expression and the tears. “Where’s Frank?” he asked once he saw that the Captain was not found by his
CAPS-Link
.

              Tamara could no longer form words. Everything that she tried to say came out in blubbers.

              “Um, she just said that Frank’s implant went dark,” Terry explained.

              Alonso opened his mouth to speak, but heard the rapid firing of a handgun from within the building. Beyond the roaring fire and the sirens, the sound was unmistakable. Looking over the pattern of the fire, he deduced that whoever just fired those shots was on the eastern side of the building, which had not yet caught the blaze.

              “Come on,” he mumbled as he touched Tamara’s arm and jogged toward Wabash, the street that the ‘back’ of the oddly designed church faced.

              Tam followed and so did Terry, unwilling to leave the lady that the detective had entrusted to him.

              Lorenzo eyed the little windows that were set along the top of the church’s walls as he went along and, recalling the blueprints from his implant’s memory, plotted the possible whereabouts of Frank Campanelli. A daunting amount of smoke poured out of these little windows, up to the as yet unscathed amphitheater. Working it out, he discovered that it was possible that the man could have wound his way through the maze of offices at the center of the building and found the exits at the amphitheater.

              The fire was making its way to the eastern half of the church very quickly, fanned along by southeasterly winds. Alonso looked about him for a firefighting crew.

              “Hey! Hey!” he shouted to the group that was manning a hose near the front of the building. He waved them over, but only one left his hose to see what the policeman in the highly decorated dress uniform wanted. “We have a man inside,” Alonso explained, “that may be trying to escape through the side exits to the theater. Get a crew and join me at the door.”

              The young firefighter turned on his heels and ran to retrieve help.

              Lorenzo, Tam and Terry stepped along the widened alley toward Wabash while each of them searched the windows in hope of spotting Frank.

              They arrived to the auxiliary exits on the northeast corner of the building. Alonso searched nervously behind them for signs of the help he had asked for. He could see a trio of firemen on the way.

              “Okay,” he said as he took a step toward the burning structure, “stay here, Tam.” To the man with her whom he did not know, he said, “Watch her, please.” The young man nodded.

              As the three firemen came closer, something very large and immensely heavy gave way on the western side of the church. The Deputy Chief, Tam, Terry and the three firefighters rushing to meet them all stopped to look behind. The garage roof had caved in, taking several feet of the walls down with it. The sudden influx of fresh air fed the fire and it rose up again even more furiously. A plume of orange and yellow jutted into the sky, sheathed in black smoke.

              “Sir,” the lieutenant of the engine crew shouted over the hellacious ruckus, “the Battalion Chief says no one’s going in there! This whole building’s done!”

              Tam’s deep sobs drove her to the ground and Terry squatted to console her. Seeing this, Alonso snatched the hatchet from the lieutenant’s hands and sprinted to the doors. The lieutenant screamed for him to stop and the three firefighters pursued him.

              Before Alonso could get within ten meters of the building, the very doors that he planned on chopping through burst toward him. The Deputy Chief stumbled to a startled stop, causing one of the firemen to run into him.

              From within the smoke-darkened depths of the church’s amphitheater an obscured figure emerged, hunched over and covered in black soot. The man stopped in front of them, coughed and hacked, spat and wretched as he tried to draw breath into his assaulted lungs.

              One of the firefighters rushed to the survivor and offered a mask of oxygen to him. It was gratefully accepted and the familiar figure stood up straight to take in the precious gas.

              Alonso smiled. “Frank.”

              Campanelli nodded and weakly gave his scout salute. After he took another deep breath from the mask and cleared his airway with yet another cough he greeted, “Deputy Chief.”

              “Fraaaank!” shrieked Tamara for the second time that day. She ran as fast as she could toward him and nearly knocked him to the cement in a tight embrace. “Oh! Frank!” she cried.

              “I’m okay,” he assured her, but coughed harshly.

              “Sorry!” she blurted and let up on her grip.

              “Are you all right?” Frank asked as he wiped a thumb near her swollen eye.

              “I think it’s fine,” she dismissed and covered him with kisses. He tasted like salt and charcoal, but she cared not.

              “When you went offline, we thought you were…uh,” Lorenzo Alonso stammered.

              Campanelli explained DeSilva’s inhibiting device and his cane-assisted shooting. “I was…just lying there…waiting to die when I remembered,” he paused to hack and take in more oxygen. “I remembered the circuit breaker box. I felt around for it, opened it and pulled everything I could feel until the power to the device went dead. I rebooted the
CAPS-Link
and could see again.”

              An incessant police siren approached at high speed. Alonso looked about for its source as he said, “That was good work, Frank. But you’re lucky to have gotten out.”

              “Thank you, sir,” Campanelli returned and gave Tam a smoky-lipped kiss, “but I’m not done.”

              “What?” Tam and Alonso said at the same time.

              “Vanek betrayed me. Betrayed us,” Frank explained as his cruiser screamed into the alley. “DeSilva told me that he was taking his family to Alethea right now. I think I know where he’s heading…”

              “Frank!” Tam bellowed in a warning.

              “I’m putting out an APD for him in case I’m wrong,” he said as he gently freed himself of Billingsley’s embrace and stepped to the waiting car. “If I’m right, I’ll bring him back.”

              Shocked, no one in the group could say a word as they watched the dark blue unmarked police car back out onto Wabash and accelerate away in a cloud of tire smoke.

              “Son of a bitch,” Tam murmured in a tone that was anything but anger.

              “He took my oxygen tank,” the young lieutenant complained.

              Alonso turned to stare at the man and refrained to say what was on his mind. Instead, he handed the firefighter the axe and let him lead his two subordinates away.

              “Let me take you to the hospital,” Alonso said to Billingsley. She nodded in grateful acquiescence. The Deputy Chief then turned to the young stranger. “And who are you?”